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Diana Damrau & Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Saturday 26 January 2019 7.30pm, Hall

Richard Strauss Four Last Songs

interval 20 minutes

Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben

Diana Damrau soprano Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Mariss Jansons conductor

Part of Diana Damrau sings Strauss Part of Barbican Presents 2018–19

Programme produced by Harriet Smith; printed by Trade Winds Colour Printers Ltd; advertising by Cabbell (tel 020 3603 7930)

Please turn off watch alarms, phones, pagers etc during the performance. Taking photographs, capturing images or using recording devices during a performance is strictly prohibited.

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The City of London Corporation is the founder and principal funder of the Barbican Centre

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Welcome

A warm welcome to the second concert in Diana Damrau’s Barbican residency, Diana Damrau sings Strauss. This evening she is joined by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under its Chief Conductor Mariss Jansons. In the first concert of Diana’s residency we encountered Strauss the Lieder composer, in the company of Wolf and Liszt. Now we hear him working on an altogether bigger scale, in pieces that showcase his extraordinary ear for orchestral colour and drama.

We begin with Strauss’s autumnal Four Last Songs, pieces written right at the end of his life and which are suffused with a poignancy and beauty that has long made them irresistible to singers and audiences alike.

Mariss Jansons and the BRSO conclude the concert with the young Strauss. Ein Heldenleben (‘A Hero’s Life’) is one of a series of youthful yet hugely impressive tone-poems. As Strauss once protested when asked about the work’s specific programme: ‘All you need to know is that it portrays a hero in combat with his enemies’. And how vigorously and brilliantly Strauss depicts that in music.

It promises to be a wonderful evening. Do join us for Diana’s last concert in her residency when, on 31 March, she gives the world premiere of Iain Bell’s The Hidden Place and performs the closing scene from Strauss’s Capriccio.

Huw Humphreys, Head of Music, Barbican

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For texts, see page 8

Richard Georg Strauss was born in Munich in 1864 almost exactly a year before the first performance of Richard Wagner’s music drama Tristan und Isolde in the Bavarian capital. This is an important connection; indeed in the fullness of time Strauss would be nicknamed Richard the Second! His father Franz was a noted horn player who detested Richard the First’s music, though Wagner bore him no grudge, admiring his skill as a musician: ‘Old Strauss is an unbearable fellow’, he declared, ‘but when he plays the horn one can’t really mind him.’

Strauss senior had joined the Munich Court Orchestra in 1847 and would be their leading horn player for more than four decades. From the start he recognised and nurtured his son’s musical talents; and, as well as receiving regular music lessons, the younger Strauss was taken to the opera. His second visit was to a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which kindled a life-long love for the earlier composer’s music and, perhaps a passion to write opera. He later wrote to a friend, ‘Mozart, with few means, says everything a listener could desire to be refreshed and truly entertained and edified, the others use

all the means at their disposal to say absolutely nothing, or hardly anything. The world is crazy! To blazes with it! But I’ve made a vow, when I appear at an important concert for the first time … I will play a Mozart concerto.’ And, true to his word, when Strauss made his debut at the piano on 20 October 1885, he played the Mozart C minor Concerto, K491, with his own cadenzas.

By then Strauss had fallen under Wagner’s spell despite his father’s contempt for the wizard of Bayreuth. At the age of 9 he had seen his first performances of Lohengrin and Tannhäuser (and presumably behind his father’s back as it was not until he was 16 that Richard acquired a score of Tristan und Isolde). One can only speculate, but on the evidence of the works that he would write it seems likely that it was Wagner’s music dramas that convinced Richard Strauss that what he wanted most was to write for the stage.

But how to find his own voice? Like so many late 19th-century composers, and not just in Germany and Austria, Strauss was confronted by a creative conundrum: how to learn from Wagner but not simply copy him. Strauss’s first opera, Guntram, given its premiere in Weimar in May 1894, was not a success. It was judged

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) Four Last Songs (1948) 1 Frühling

2 September3 Beim Schlafengehen4 Im Abendrot

Ein Heldenleben (1898) The Hero – The Hero’s Adversaries – The Hero’s Companion – The Hero’s Battlefield – The Hero’s Works of Peace – The Hero’s retirement from the World and Fulfilment

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to be too close to Wagner. Before starting work on its successor Strauss, always prolific, began to compose his great sequence of symphonic poems and Lieder. What he gilds and burnishes in the tone-poems are his skills as an orchestral composer, while in the songs he explores the expressive possibilities of the human voice – though it must be said it was the soprano voice that he loved best and for which he wrote most frequently. But when you step back from the success of both of these genres something else perhaps becomes evident. The two essential skills for the post-Wagnerian opera composer are the ability to use the orchestra to further the drama and the art of setting words to music. And these are precisely the skills that Strauss is polishing in Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben, and songs such as the four that he gave to his wife-to-be Pauline von Ahna as a wedding present – ‘Ruhe, meine Seele!’, ‘Cäcilie’, ‘Heimliche Auffordung’ and ‘Morgen’. Between the premiere of Guntram and the first night of his second opera Feuersnot in 1901, Richard Strauss composed over 60 songs: he was teaching himself how not to be a Wagnerian.

Another way of listening to the tone-poems is to hear them as character studies – Macbeth, Till Eulenspiegel, Zarathustra, Don Juan, a man at the moment of his death, and in the Sinfonia domestica and tonight’s work Ein Heldenleben, the composer himself. These are works that explore the descriptive power of music and its ability to reveal the psychology of the individual – essential qualities to be mastered by anyone who intends to compose for the stage.

It is sometimes suggested that these pieces are a monstrous exercise in narcissistic egoism, that Strauss himself is not just the subject of Ein Heldenleben and Sinfonia domestica or the last of these orchestral compositions, An Alpine

Symphony, but the hero of every single work from Macbeth onwards. But that is to miss two things: firstly, that these works engage with a quintessentially 19th-century debate about what constitutes the heroic in modern life; secondly, that all of them are tinged by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who contributed to that debate in radical ways and whom Strauss much admired. So it’s not so much Richard Strauss who is the hero of Ein Heldenleben, rather, the heroic life we hear is that of the composer and the artist. Perhaps the title of the work would be better translated as ‘A Heroic Life’.

Strauss began to think about the work early in 1897. On 16 April he noted that he had begun writing a new symphonic poem, Held und Welt (‘Hero and World’). ‘And with it’, he added, ‘Don Quixote as satyr-play.’ It is clear that he conceived the two works to be played in the same programme. First he set the ‘knight with the woeful countenance’ to music, completing the work just after Christmas 1897. The second work, known variously as Heldenleben, Held und Welt, Heroische Sinfonie, and even Eroica, was completed in short score on 30 July 1898 and the full score, with a major revision to the end of the work, was done by 1 December the same year.

Strauss was all too aware that a huge shadow loomed over his new piece – that of Beethoven and the ‘Eroica’ Symphony. In July 1898 he wrote in ironic vein to a friend, ‘Since Beethoven’s “Eroica” is so unpopular with conductors and thus rarely performed nowadays, I am now, in order to meet what is clearly an urgent need, composing a big tone poem with the title Heldenleben (to be sure, without a funeral march, but still in E flat major and with very many horns, which are, after all, stamped for heroism).’

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in dissonance. The score gives the players very clear directions – the oboe snarls, the cymbals hiss and from the back of the orchestra the tubas pontificate about what purists maintained was a musical solecism: ‘parallel fifths’.

In the face of such an onslaught the hero’s theme takes on a darker hue when it returns. But then a solo violin breaks rank and paints an exquisite portrait of the hero’s wife: ‘The Hero’s Companion’ is the longest and most elaborate movement in the piece. This is clearly a portrait of Pauline de Ahna. ‘She is very complicated,’ Strauss told Romain Rolland, ‘très femme, a little perverse, a bit of a coquette, never the same twice, different each minute from what she was a minute earlier. At the beginning, the hero follows her lead, picking up the pitch she has just sung, but she escapes further and further away. Finally he says, “All right, go. I’m staying here,” and he withdraws into his thoughts, his own key. But then she goes after him.’

As the solo violin coaxes the entire orchestra to join it, Strauss writes some of his most sumptuous love music. But the enemies are at the gate, cackling away in the depths of the orchestra. The hero rouses himself. Trumpets summon him to ‘The Hero’s Battlefield’. Of course he is victorious and in musical terms rewarded with a recapitulation that, as one critic notes, is ‘as clear and as formal as the most ardent classicist could wish.’

Peace returns and we hear ‘The Hero’s Works of Peace’, with subtly interwoven quotations from Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, Don Quixote, Macbeth and the song ‘Traum durch die Dämmerung’. This is much more than a tour d’horizon of Strauss’s back catalogue. There is a sheen, an opalescence to the tonal colouring in this section as he bends the orchestra to his creative will.

Strauss was always reluctant to give his works an extra-musical programme, arguing that they should say those things which only music could say. At the same time he increasingly came to believe that an art without human content was not art of any value and, in the case of Ein Heldenleben, he began to jot down verbal sketches for the work before writing a note of music. ‘Why,’ he asked in a late entry in his notebook, ‘does no-one see the new element in my compositions, how in them – as otherwise only in Beethoven – the man is visible in the work?’ And when he was coaxed into revealing a programme for Ein Heldenleben he explained to the French writer Romain Rolland: ‘You don’t have to read my programme. All you need to know is that it portrays a hero in combat with his enemies.’

Ein Heldenleben is written for a very large orchestra that includes eight horns, five trumpets, two tubas, quadruple woodwind and two harps, and it makes considerable demands on all the players. Someone once remarked that this is a work that needs an orchestra of virtuosos to do it justice. Formally, it’s constructed in an extended sonata form with a number of additional episodes. There’s a development section which is divided into three parts and a coda. But that’s not how you hear the work. It’s the narrative that holds our attention, content taking precedence over form.

In the opening section we meet the hero, tender, passionate and with more than a hint of braggadocio. His quixotic moods prompt some of Strauss’s lushest writing for the orchestra. Next, after a deeply effective moment of silence – the hero gathering his thoughts to face the world – we meet his enemies, ‘The Hero’s Adversaries’. These are critics, of course, who are spiky, nit-picking and mired

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But the adversaries still refuse to lie down and die. The Hero rages and then, in a totally uncharacteristic gesture as far as Strauss the man was concerned, renounces the struggle. In ‘The Hero’s Retirement from the World and Fulfilment’, he reminds us of his pugnacious dealings with the enemy and his domestic tenderness before the music slips into a blissful serenity. Or it did in the original version. However, on hearing the pianissimo close with violins, timpani and a single horn, Strauss’s friend Rösch is supposed to have chided the composer: ‘Richard, another pianissimo ending! People won’t believe that you even know how to end forte!!’ The story may be an exaggeration but in the days between Christmas and New Year 1898–9 Strauss did rewrite the end. It’s still sweet sounding but now there’s a heroic fortissimo to complete this history.

Virtually half a century after writing Ein Heldenleben Richard Strauss was ready to embrace the first peaceful resignation that he had given his hero. His Vier letzte Lieder (‘Four Last Songs’), dating from 1948, are an achingly beautiful farewell to the world that Strauss had lived in – both the natural world around him marked out by the seasons and the musical world that he had summoned into being for 60 years.

After the ceasefire that ended the Second World War in Europe he and his wife had made their home in Switzerland. The composer himself was under a shadow for having apparently

collaborated with the Nazis when they came to power in the early 1930s, though it now seems that what he freely acknowledged was an error of judgement may have grown from a desire to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law. The composer was restless in Switzerland, concerned about what was happening to cultural life under the Allied Occupation, particularly the Americans, and with a blueprint of his own for reviving Germany’s artistic life. He constantly lobbied officials despite his son Franz advising his father to keep quiet. ‘Why not write some songs?’, he is supposed to have said to his father in exasperation. Some months later Strauss visited Franz and left the manuscript of the Four Last Songs with his daughter-in-law, saying ‘Here are the songs your husband ordered.’

Strauss had chosen to set one poem by Joseph von Eichendorff and three by Hermann Hesse for full orchestra and his beloved soprano voice. And as they unfold, they become a distillation of everything that Strauss had achieved as a man and as a composer – not just with discreet quotations from his own music, but with husband and wife both present in each song. The soprano soloist arching above the orchestra reminds us that Strauss’s wife Pauline de Ahna was a distinguished concert soloist and the horn that so often accompanies the vocal line is clearly Strauss himself.

In ‘Frühling’ by Hermann Hesse the dark world of the coming winter is transformed into the promise

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of spring. Strauss effortlessly moves the season through a sequence of delicate chromatic shifts.

‘September’, another setting of Hesse, is a solemn hymn that plays with the double meaning of sleep, as rest from which we awake and as death.

Sleep and death walk hand in hand in ‘Beim Schlafengehen’, the third of the Hesse poems. The music begins with a heavy, exhausted yawn: as the day ends, so must life. But what is beyond?, asks the soloist. Sleep and death are two mysteries.

The final song sets a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff. In ‘Im Abendrot’ Strauss lavishes all his skill on a setting that is in many ways a last love letter to Pauline. She and Strauss are the two larks represented by a pair of soaring, trilling flutes. And then there’s that soft murmur of the transfiguration theme from his tone-poem Death and Transfiguration. ‘How weary we are of our journeying – is this perhaps death?’

Strauss himself died before he could hear these four last songs. They were given their first performance in London at the Royal Albert Hall in May 1950. The soloist was Kirsten Flagstad as Strauss had always wanted and Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra. Here perhaps is a reconciliation that Strauss would have relished: a great German conductor, a Norwegian soprano who had been one of the most admired Wagnerian singers of her generation, and a British orchestra.

Programme note © Christopher Cook

8Four Last Songs1 FrühlingIn dämmrigen GrüftenTräumte ich langVon deinen Bäumen and blauen Lüften,Von deinem Duft und Vogelsang.

Nun liegst du erschlossenIn Gleiss und Zier,Von Licht übergossen,Wie ein Wunder vor mir.

Du kennst mich wieder,Du lockst mich zart;Es zittert durch all meine GliederDeine selige Gegenwart.

2 SeptemberDer Garten trauert,Kühl sinkt in die Blumen der Regen.Der Sommer schauertStill seinem Ende entgegen.

Golden tropft Blatt um BlattNieder vom hohen Akazienbaum.Sommer lächelt erstaunt und mattIn den sterbenden Gartentraum.

Lange noch bei den RosenBleibt er stehn, sehnt sich nach Ruh.Langsam tut er dieMüdgewordnen Augen zu.

SpringIn sombre shadowsI dreamt longof your trees, your blue skies,of your fragrance, and the song of birds.

Now you lie revealed,glistening, adorned,bathed in lightlike a miracle before me.

You recognise me,you beckon gently;my limbs tremblewith your blessed presence.

SeptemberThe garden grieves,the cool rain sinks into the flowers.The summer shuddersand silently meets her end.

Leaf upon leaf drops goldenfrom the tall acacia tree.Wondering, faintly, summer smilesin the dying garden’s dream.

Long by the rosesshe lingers, yearning for peace.Slowly she closes herwearied eyes.

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xtsGoing to Sleep

Now made tired by the day,so my ardent desire shallwarmly greet the starry nightlike a tired child.

Hands, cease your doing,brow, forget all thought;all my senses nowwould sink into slumber.

And my soul, unguarded,would soar free in flight,and in the magic sphere of nightlive life deep a thousand-fold.

At SunsetThrough sorrow and joywe have walked hand in hand;now we are at rest from our journeyabove the silent land.

The valleys descend all about us,the sky grows dark;only two larks yet soarwistfully in the haze.

Come, leave them to fly;soon it will be time to sleep;let us not lose our wayin this solitude!

O boundless, silent peace!So deep in the sunset!How weary we are of our journeying –is this perhaps death?

Translations © Mari Prackauskas

3 Beim SchlafengehenNun der Tag mich müd’ gemacht,Soll mein sehnliches VerlangenFreundlich die gestirnte NachtWie ein müdes Kind empfangen.

Hände, lasst von allem Tun,Stirn, vergiss du alles Denken;Alle meine Sinne nunWollen sich in Schlummer senken.

Und die Seele, unbewacht,Will in freien Flügen schweben,Um im Zauberkreis der NachtTief und tausendfach zu leben.

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) © 1952 Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

4 Im AbendrotWir sind durch Not und FreudeGegangen Hand in Hand;Vom Wandern ruhen wirNun überm stillen Land.

Rings sich die Täler neigen,Es dunkelt schon die Luft;Zwei Lerchen nur noch steigenNachträumend in den Duft.

Tritt her und lass sie schwirren;Bald ist es Schlafenszeit;Dass wir uns nicht verirrenIn dieser Einsamkeit!

O weiter, stiller Friede!So tief im Abendrot!Wie sind wir wandermüde –Ist dies etwa der Tod?

Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857)

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Roderick WilliamsMilton Court Artist-in-Residence

Tue 19 FebAn Italian SongbookTue 26 FebRoderick Williams in recital

We celebrate one of our most engaging musicians as a singer, composer and dramatic collaborator.

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Diana Damrau soprano

Soprano Diana Damrau has been performing on the world’s leading opera and concert stages for two decades. Her vast repertoire spans both lyric soprano and coloratura roles including the title-roles in Lucia di Lammermoor (La Scala, Bavarian State Opera, Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House), Manon (Vienna State Opera, Metropolitan Opera) and La traviata (La Scala, Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House, Opéra de Paris and Bavarian State Opera), as well as Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute (Metropolitan Opera, Salzburg Festival, Vienna State Opera, Royal Opera House).

Invested as Kammersängerin of the Bavarian State Opera (2007) and holder of the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art (2010), Diana Damrau has forged close links with the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where she has been seen in new productions of Lucia di Lammermoor, Les contes d’Hoffmann (the four heroines), Ariadne auf Naxos (Zerbinetta), Die schweigsame Frau (Aminta), The Magic Flute (Queen of the Night) and Rigoletto (Gilda). Other high-profile appearances have included La traviata (Violetta) and Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Constanze).

The Metropolitan Opera is a house in which the soprano has performed her signature roles, been broadcast in HD to cinemas globally and made seven role debuts since her own debut there as Zerbinetta in 2005. Highlights

Diana Damrau

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have included new productions of Rigoletto, The Barber of Seville (Rosina), Le comte Ory (Adèle) and Les pêcheurs des perles (Leïla).

Diana Damrau has twice participated in the annual inaugural performance at La Scala, Milan: in 2004 in the title-role of Salieri’s Europa riconosciuta at the house’s reopening and in 2013 as Violetta in a new production of La traviata to commemorate Verdi’s 200th anniversary.

She has also performed contemporary works for the opera stage in roles written especially for her, most notably in the title-role of Iain Bell’s operatic adaptation of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (Theater an der Wien, 2013) and as Drunken Woman/Gym Instructress in Lorin Maazel’s 1984 (Royal Opera House, 2005).

Diana Damrau has established herself as one of today’s most sought-after interpreters of song, regularly performing at leading venues worldwide. She enjoys a close artistic partnership with pianist Helmut Deutsch and frequently performs in recital with harpist Xavier de Maistre. The latter collaboration can be heard in the CD release Nuit d’étoiles and a DVD capturing their performance at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden.

She has an exclusive recording contract with Warner/Erato and her award-winning discography includes Mozart and Salieri arias and songs by Liszt and Richard Strauss. Her most recent disc, Grand Opera, is dedicated to the music of Meyerbeer.

Highlights last season included a return to the Bavarian State Opera for the title-role in Lucia di Lammermoor and as Violetta; her role debut in the title-role of Maria Stuarda at the Zurich Opera House, which she reprised at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where she also made her role debut as Marguérite (Faust); and Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots at the Opéra de Paris. She also performed Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch on tour with Jonas Kaufmann and Helmut Deutsch at major European venues, including here at the Barbican.

About the performersRoderick WilliamsMilton Court Artist-in-Residence

Tue 19 FebAn Italian SongbookTue 26 FebRoderick Williams in recital

We celebrate one of our most engaging musicians as a singer, composer and dramatic collaborator.

12In September 2017 she opened the concert season of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam. At the reopening gala of the Berlin State Opera she sang in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under Daniel Barenboim.

Recent and forthcoming highlights include the role of Violetta at the Metropolitan Opera in December 2018, Marguérite at the Royal Opera House in April and a residency here at the Barbican Centre.

www.diana-damrau.com

instagram.com/diana.damrau facebook.com/DianaDamrau twitter.com/@DianaDamrau

Concerts, Tours & Media Diana Damrau: CCM Classic Concerts Management www.ccm-international.de

Diana Damrau records exclusively for Erato/Warner Classics

Mariss Jansons conductor

Mariss Jansons is considered one of the most outstanding conductors of our time. He was born in 1943 in Riga and is the son of the conductor ArvI-ds Jansons; he studied at the Leningrad Conservatoire and later in Vienna under Hans Swarowsky and in Salzburg under Herbert von

Karajan. In 1971 Evgeny Mravinsky made him his assistant with the Leningrad Philharmonic (today’s St Petersburg Philharmonic). He remained closely connected with this orchestra as a regular conductor until 1999.

From 1979 to 2000 he was Chief Conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic, which he developed into a leading international orchestra. In addition, he was Principal Guest Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1992–7) and Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (1997–2004).

Since 2003, he has been the Chief Conductor of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. From 2004 to 2015 he was also Chief Conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Among other orchestras he also works regularly with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics. In 2016 he conducted the New Year’s Concert in Vienna for the third time.

Mariss Jansons has toured with the BRSO and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra to virtually every musical capital and festival city in the world. In 2005 his tour to Japan and China with the BRSO was hugely acclaimed; together they also make regular appearances as Orchestra-in-Residence at the Easter Festival in Lucerne.

Working with young musicians is close to his heart. He has conducted the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra on a European tour and has given concerts with various Bavarian youth orchestras and with the Academy of the BRSO in Munich.

Mariss Jansons has recorded a wide range of repertoire with both the BRSO and the Royal Concertgebouw. These releases have won many international prizes, among them a Grammy for Shostakovich’s complete symphonies. He has also been named Conductor of the Year by ECHO Klassik (2007) and by Opernwelt magazine (2011). Under his baton, the BRSO was named Orchestra of the Year by ECHO Klassik in 2010 for its recording of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony.

Mariss Jansons

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ersOther awards include the Norwegian Royal

Order of Merit, the Austrian Cross of Honour for Scholarship and Art, the Three Stars Medal of the Republic of Latvia and the Bavarian Order of Maximilian. In 2013 Mariss Jansons was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize and the German Federal Cross of Merit, 1st Class, was made a Knight of the Lion of the Netherlands and was appointed Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 2015 he was honoured with the Latvian Great Music Award, the country’s highest artistic accolade. In 2017 he won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s prestigious Gold Medal, while in 2018 both the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras gave him Honorary Membership in gratitude for their long association The same year Denmark bestowed upon Mariss Jansons the Léonie Sonning Music Prize and the Salzburg Festival awarded him its highest honour, the ‘Festival Brooch with rubies’.

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1949 by Eugen Jochum; it rapidly developed into an internationally renowned orchestra under chief conductors Rafael Kubelík, Colin Davis and Lorin Maazel. Since 2003 that role has fallen to Mariss Jansons, who has continued to set new standards.

As well as the orchestra’s repertoire of Classical and Romantic music, there is a strong focus on contemporary works, in conjunction with the musica viva series founded in 1945 by Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Right from the orchestra’s earliest days, contemporary music has played an important role, with works by composers such as Stravinsky and Milhaud, as well as, more recently, Stockhausen, Kagel, Berio and Peter Eötvös, with many of them conducting their own music. The orchestra has also worked with many renowned guest conductors, including Erich

and Carlos Kleiber, Otto Klemperer, Leonard Bernstein, Georg Solti, Carlo Maria Giulini, Kurt Sanderling and – in more recent times – Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Muti, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Herbert Blomstedt, Daniel Harding, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Sir Simon Rattle and Andris Nelsons.

As well as giving regular performances in Munich and throughout Germany, the orchestra also tours to Europe, Asia and North and South America. It makes regular appearances at New York’s Carnegie Hall and at renowned concert halls in musical centres worldwide. It has also been, since 2004, Orchestra-in-Residence at the Easter Festival in Lucerne.

The BRSO has a particular focus on nurturing up-and-coming musicians. In conjunction with the ARD International Music Competition, it accompanies young musicians in both the final rounds and the prizewinners’ concert. Since 2001 the Academy of the BRSO has been doing vital educational work by preparing young musicians for their careers and thus building a solid bridge between education and professional activity. In addition to this, the BRSO undertakes outreach programmes to bring classical music to a younger generation of music lovers.

The BRSO has a large discography on a wide range of labels, including Bavarian Broadcasting’s own label BR-Klassik. It has won many national and international awards, including a Grammy in 2006; most recently it received BBC Music Magazine’s Recording of the Year for Mahler’s Third Symphony conducted by Bernard Haitink and the German Record Critics’ Prize for Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony conducted by Mariss Jansons.

br-so.com facebook.com/BRSO Twitter: @BRSOinstagram.com/BRSOrchestra

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Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Violin 1Radoslaw Szulc *Anton Barachovsky *Tobias Steymans *Thomas Reif *Julita SmolenMichael ChristiansPeter RiehmCorinna Clauser-FalkFranz ScheuererMichael FriedrichAndrea KarpinskiDaniel NodelMarije GrevinkNicola BirkhanKarin LöfflerAnne SchoenholtzDaniela JungAndrea KimJohanna Pichlmair

Violin 2Korbinian Altenberger *Jehye Lee *Heather Cottrell *Yi LiAndreas WohlmacherAngela KoeppenNicolaus Richter de VroeLeopold LercherKey-Thomas MärklBettina BernklauValérie GillardStephan HoeverDavid van DijkSusanna PietschCelina BäumerAmelie Böckheler

ViolaHermann Menninghaus *Wen Xiao Zheng *Benedict HamesAndreas MarschikAnja KreynackeMathias SchesslInka AmelnKlaus-Peter WeraniChristiane HörrVeronique BastianGiovanni MennaAlice Marie Weber

CelloLionel Cottet *Hanno SimonsStefan TrauerEva-Christiane LassmannJan Mischlich-AndresenUta ZenkeJaka StadlerFrederike Jehkul-SadlerSamuel LutzkerKatharina Jäckle

Double BassHeinrich Braun *Philipp Stubenrauch *Wies de BoevéAlexandra ScottFrank ReineckePiotr StefaniakTeja AndresenLukas Richter

FlutePhilippe Boucly *Henrik Wiese *Petra SchiesselNatalie SchwaabeIvanna Ternay

OboeStefan Schilli *Ramón Ortega Quero *Emma SchiedTobias Vogelmann

ClarinetStefan Schilling *Christopher Corbett *Werner MittelbachBettina FaissHeinrich Treydte

BassoonEberhard Marschall *Marco Postinghel *Rainer SeidelSusanne Sonntag

HornEric Terwilliger *Carsten Carey Duffin *Ursula KepserThomas RuhRalf SpringmannNorbert DausackerFrançois Bastian

TrumpetHannes Läubin *Martin Angerer *Wolfgang LäubinThomas KiechleHerbert Zimmermann

TromboneHansjörg Profanter *Thomas Horch *Uwe SchrodiLukas Gassner

TubaStefan Tischler

TimpaniStefan ReuterRaymond Curfs

PercussionMarkus SteckelerGuido MarggranderChristian Pilz

HarpMagdalena Hoffmann

PianoLukas Maria Kuen

* principal

This list represents the orchestra roster for the 2018–19 season

DIANA DAMRAU and JONAS KAUFMANN, reigning stars of opera, are also consummate interpreters of song. In early 2018, with master pianist HELMUT DEUTSCH, they performed

Hugo Wolf’s multi-faceted Italienisches Liederbuch in 12 cities around Europe. “One couldn’t ask for more,” wrote the Telegraph after their London Barbican concert, which took

place two days before this live recording was made in the German city of Essen.

★★★★The Times

★★★★The Guardian

★★★★Financial Times

★★★★london eveninG

sTandardRECORDING OF THE WEEK

PresTo classical

NEW FROMDIANA DAMRAU

Sat 25 May 2019

Orchestra of Santa Cecilia/Antonio PappanoMahler Symphony No 6